Abstract
We investigated the present situation of dialysis facilities accepting HIV-infected endstage renal disease patients. We sent questionnaires to 3,802 Japanese dialysis facilities, and obtained 1,552 responses (40.82% recovery rate). Those which had experience of accepting HIV-infected dialysis patients were 94 facilites (6.2%), and 1,434 (93.8%) had no such experience. Eighty-nine HIV-infected patients were dialyzed in November, 2011 in Japan (60 facilities, range: 1～7 patients, 1.48±1.12 persons (mean±S. D.)). Sixty-nine of these (74.2%) answered yes to the question of whether they would continue to accept HIV-infected dialysis patients. In facilities with no experience of HIV-infected dialysis patient acceptance, 227 facilities (15.7%) would accept them if referred, and 445 facilities (30.7%) are preparing for acceptance from now on. A total of 776 facilities (53.6%) refused the future acceptance of HIV-infected dialysis patients. The reasons for being “hard to accept” were “the difficulties to prepare the dedicated bed and dialysis machines”, “the procedures for HIV-infected dialysis patients are not clearly organized”, and “back-up facilities for sudden changes in patients' conditions are not available”. We conclude that there are many difficulties for private sector facilities to accept HIV-infected dialysis patients due to the lack of public assistance.
